From time to time I find articles, texts or poems which I really like. But in some of those cases the text is typeset in such a poor way that it makes me sad. For me, typography has the same role as rhetoric—the way in which you say something can have a totally different impact and I think this is equally true for text and typography.

Sometimes I take time and make an effort to typeset the text in a better way. I have decided to publish some of these workings here from time to time. The first example is a poem by Kate, which was published in a collection last year. I love the poem and was quite saddened about the typesetting (on which she had no influence).

This is the published version:

And this is my reworked version:

In the published version the title of the poem was omitted and I don’t think the feather nor the font-face fit the text in any way. The photo quality of the feather really is as bad in the print as in the photo above. The font I used in the reworking is the Adobe Garamond Pro. The ornament is taken from the gorgeous Hoefler Text. If you are interested in the sourcecode of the newly set version (written in XeTeX): I have published it here. There you will also find the PDF version.

I have a significant stream of visitors looking for LaTeX invoice templates (my magento-on-latex post is probably good seo 😉 ). When I started using LaTeX I had exactly the same need and wrote my own invoice template.

In the meantime I have created several other templates. I now packed them all up and put a repository latex-template-collection up on github. Currently there are templates for letters, timesheets (thanks to Dennis Mack!) and invoices. I am going to contiously add new templates.

The templates still have room for optimization (e.g. automatically increment the invoice position, etc.). Please feel free to contribute.

I created a cheatsheet for the popular window manager awesome in LaTeX.

Awesome is a neat, highly configurable window manager for X. It is available for all the main linux distributions. I use awesome because it gets you highly productive. Since you can completely use it by keyboard and since it is a tiling window manager you don’t have to waste time on thinking about arranging your screen or move your hand from keyboard to mouse.

The sheet is available on my github account as a *.tex and as a *.pdf file. I think the code could be useful for other people, maybe for creating similar cheat sheets – since they all use nearly the same layout.